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April 20, 2011

State officials ready to hold talks with donors

Representatives of donor countries are set to meet today with government
officials to discuss the Kingdom’s progress on a set of benchmarks
agreed upon in connection with the donation of more than a billion
dollars in aid last year.

Held at the Council for the Development
of Cambodia in Phnom Penh, the gathering will assess the 20 “Joint
Monitoring Indicators” set forth in June at the third Cambodia
Development Cooperation Forum, in which donor countries pledged
development assistance for the upcoming 18-month period. At that
meeting, donors pledged a record US$1.1 billion in aid.

Chith Sam
Ath, executive director of NGO Forum, said in an email that the JMIs
are “important tools to measure the progress of government commitments”.

The monitoring indicators set forth in June call for
improvements in land tenure rights, resource revenue transparency and
judicial reform. Other benchmarks relate to issues including demining,
education and food security.

Government and donor officials were tight-lipped this week when asked to discuss the meeting.

Sun
Chanthol, vice chairman of the Council for the Development of Cambodia,
confirmed that the meeting would take place but declined to comment
further.

United States Embassy spokesman Mark Wenig called the
gathering a “private” meeting, while officials at the World Bank, who
are coordinating among development officials attending the meeting,
declined to comment.

A brief agenda for the meeting, obtained
yesterday by The Post, states that those in attendance will “review
progress in implementing the Joint Monitoring Indicators and the agreed
actions made at the 3rd CDCF meeting in June 2010”, while also
discussing the government’s national social protection strategy and
other issues.

Lun Borithy, executive director of the Cooperation
Committee for Cambodia, said today’s meeting could be significant if the
government is in fact held to account against the JMIs, though he
warned that such accountability was often lacking.

“Technically,
the donors can say, ‘You haven’t achieved this, so we can hold back
money,’” he said. “But there’s been too much of a ‘gentlemen’s club’ –
everything has been prepared in advance, [and] when they go in, they
talk about everything but the JMI itself.”

“They find it more and more difficult to hold the government accountable to the JMIs.”

Sar
Sambath, a permanent member of the Anticorruption Unit, said
representatives of “all government ministries” would attend the meeting.